Hippos, Zoos, Education, and Art

     Have the hippos taken over the zoo?
     I read his book or essay or something by him in my early years of teaching composition and literature, maybe it was even as far back as graduate school.
     I needed to learn more about literary criticism since I’d landed a job teaching literature and essay writing at a local community college. I’d received degrees in Spanish and English and, though we read much literature, my focus was composition, which I figured I’d need if I wanted to write fiction.
     Friends who had studied English at UC told me they learned more about literary criticism but less about writing. I never really wanted to be a teacher but a writer. Learning to teach composition may not have been the best choice for a budding fiction writer, but, hey, I was limited in those days.
     I don’t remember his name, maybe it was one of the Blooms, either literary critic Harold or cultural philosopher Allan, not sure, but he was renowned and influential in his field. He rejected the notion that creative writers should teach in the academy, even if they'd won literary prizes or made bestseller’s lists. When pushed, he responded with something like, “You don’t turn the zoo over to the hippopotamus.”
     I suppose he figured creative writers' passion was to write prose or poetry but not to teach, especially if they lacked the appropriate university degrees, which would tarnish the academy's integrity. Teachers teach and writers write, two completely different crafts.
     Maybe he also surmised if writers taught writing or literature, they’d be prejudiced, since many artists adhere to their favorite styles and dismiss those they don’t like, as if professor don’t. Debatable, right?
     For an artist, it is a dilemma. At the time, I wanted to write fiction, but I was also studying inside the Ivy Walls, though few west coast universities actually had ivy. At Beyond Baroque in Venice, I met Chicano writers Manuel “Manazar” Gamboa and Luis Rodriguez, who were also struggling writers. Manazar, a published poet, learned to write poetry in prison, where he’d spent a significant amount of his life, behind gangs and drugs, a real sweetheart of a man.
     Luis had been writing for various small newspapers and was contemplating accepting an offer from Cal to study journalism. Luis wasn’t a product of academia. He’d been working various jobs to survive, as he described in his bestseller, “Always Running.”
     Of course, more than anything, the three of us wanted to be published and earn a living writing, but, the way we were going, we also didn’t want to starve. From what I recall, both Manazar and Luis believed the only way to really learn to write was to—well, write. To study about writing was a whole different thing.
     In the late 1960s and early 70s, few universities offered few creative writing classes, and even fewer offered degrees in creative writing, except maybe a class of poetry. The ubiquitous MA in creative writing hadn’t yet been launched.
     Pulitzer Prize winning writer Wallace Stegner founded Stanford’s writing program in 1946, an answer to the Iowa Writers Workshop, which came together in 1936, the only institution to offer an advanced degree in creative writing. Actually, Iowa started its program “Verse-Making” in 1897, but it took 40 years to re-tool it and make it a modern fiction writing program.
     In my early days of education, what did I know? I was a working-class kid, first-generation college, a few years out of the military (a different type of institution but an institution nevertheless), spending what remained of his GI Bill, but I did know one thing, writers, fiction or otherwise, needed to know how to string together words, sentences, and paragraphs, which I did not, even with my Catholic school education. Where better to learn than in a college classroom, the basics—right?
     As I studied, I learned that from the Middle Ages through the early 1900s, the greatest fiction writers, in all languages and cultures, weren’t trained in universities. Traveling minstrels and court jesters composed verse to carry stories from one kingdom to another. I’m sure neither Shakespeare nor Cervantes took a creative writing class.
     From Mexico’s Juan Rulfo to Russia’s Tolstoy, from the French to the English, Germans, Spanish, and into the U.S., most fiction writers didn’t come from the ranks of academia. Like our illuminous critic argued, even back then, the academy wasn’t about to turn the zoo over to the hippos.
     If anybody brooked the gap between writing and scholarship, it was probably the early clerics, like monks, priests, ministers, nuns, and rabbis, a purely didactic endeavor, though, filled with elements of postmodernism and magical realism, probably unknown even to them.
     If early creative writers had been independently wealthy, like Tolstoy, or lived frugally, like the Bronte sisters, or had benefactors, as did Joseph Conrad and Langston Hughes, so much the better. But most writers had to work to survive and took to farming, business, clerking, government, and newspaper work, as did Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Elena Poniatowska, Pablo Neruda, John dos Passos, Hemingway, Garcia Marquez, and Steinbeck, who, luckily for him, made his name early with “Tortilla Flat.”
     Steinbeck had enrolled in Stanford but dropped out fearing academia would stifle not only his writing but his life experiences. Why play around in college when one can be writing? Anyway, whether one lives in dorms or in barracks, one must still follow the institution’s rules.
     Like Steinbeck, many writers who eschewed college were determined to write and not to study writing. After all, institutions create standards, and one, usually, cannot move to the next level unless he or she has met the standards.
     Academia can’t claim to be the training ground for the most influential writers of any time period, including today. I mean, there are always exceptions, but I’ll just throw out a wild guess. Fiction writers who usually fill the top spots on bestsellers lists probably come from the ranks of newspaper reporters first, then other sorts of writing, like theater, film, PR, or business, even lawyers, doctors, and cops (they write a lot of briefs and reports), and they have a lot of material. And, yes, I know, academics, even those who write fiction, snub their noses at things like bestseller's lists and popular fiction.
     On the other hand, professors commit at least 10 to 12 years of their lives to studying and the remainder to working in a classroom. That becomes the bulk of their life’s experiences. Ironically, many English teachers hardly need to write. Though many of my English department colleagues entered the profession with the intention of writing novels and short stories, most fell by the wayside, failing to sprout literary weeds.
     Even at the university level where publish or perish is the mantra, it’s well known that once teachers earn professor status, are lucky enough to have a dissertation published, and/or write a few articles for academic journals, now and again, their jobs are secure. Could it be that this security hinders creativity?
     Something about academia does kill the spirit, as Page Smith noted in his informative, thought-provoking book on academia, “Killing the Spirit,” in which he explored the impact of higher education not only on students but on faculty.
     Even in college, I remember how professors confessed their desire to write, but teaching so exhausted them, by the time summer came around, many, as they thought writers should, rented homes in the woods, but instead of writing ended up spending their vacation eating, drinking, and being merry--mainly drinking. Has much changed?
     Some claim M.A.’s and MFA’s in creative writing programs have become the “fast food” industry of fiction. So many creative writers and teachers and so few places to publish, hence the creation of the university publishing industry, to publish professors’ work in all the various disciplines.
     Oh, it isn’t that I don’t think academics can write. They can, beautifully, once they drop the academese, like the writing teacher tells his/her students, “Write what you know.” I try to buy each new publication of “The American Scholar.” In their element, academics shine, especially when they are writing about academia or topics related to their research. Who better to write about borderlands than Gloria Anzaldua? Though, one might argue, her career was more about activism, writing, and early childhood education than about formal scholarship.
     One of my favorite writers was Loren Eisley, a scientist, whose description of nature mesmerized me. A favorite poet was William Carlos Williams, an MD. Poet Omar Salinas, more troubadour than academic and Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, a fallen away lawyer, both courageously exposed deep insecurities about masculinity and ethnicity in their books.
     I would much rather read psych teachers who publish in “Psychology Today “than those obscure psychology journals; though, I agree, they do have their place.
     However, the best fiction writing about academia (by best, I mean what I like most) is Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain,” Herman Hesse’s, “The Glass Bead Game,” and the depressing but jolting “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” by Goethe.
     Still, it was a lowly, 1950s Mexican government administrator, Juan Rulfo, who, for me, stands a giant among the rest, who in but two books of less than 150 pages each, “Pedro Paramo” and “Los Llanos in Llamas," solidified his place in world literature.”
     There was a time when novelists and short story writers, and artists in general, reveled in their raggedy existence, not unlike the main character in Kafka’s short story, “The Hunger Artist.” They prided themselves in their despair and suffered in their, often, dire circumstances. Even through monetary and personal turmoil, they wrote.
     They wrote about dangerous whaling expeditions or traveling down the Mississippi on a raft with an escaped slave, even about facing a firing squad and thinking of finding ice in the wilds of a Latin American jungle, or looking for a lost crazed European logger up the Congo River, as well as a Native American WWII veteran returning home after the war, involved in a murder, and fleeing to a Los Angeles slum to try and find survival, while salvation awaited him back on his New Mexico reservation.
     So, as many composition teachers still teach their students, the thesis sentence MUST be placed as the final sentence of the introductory paragraph, I have broken the rule and buried it some place inside the body, where the director of the zoo is still fighting to keep the hippos from overtaking the zoo.